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Science

Despite Cannabinoids Study, 'Odds Aren't Fantastic' It Will Ever Treat Covid (slate.com) 175

Posted by EditorDavid from the up-in-smoke dept.
While a recent study found that cannabinoids protected cells in a petri dish from SARS-CoV-2 infection, "working in a petri dish is a relatively low bar for a drug to clear," Slate points out.

"The conventional wisdom in pharmaceutical sciences holds that, of every 10,000 drugs that shows potential effectiveness, only one will make it to market." Dish experiments need to be followed up with animal studies, and then comes the rigorous gauntlet of human trials. And between cells and humans, there's a lot that can go wrong. In a dish, scientists can deliver a drug precisely to where it is needed, but it's difficult to know ahead of time how drugs will move through a body and whether they will reach their intended targets, such as the lungs and the upper respiratory tract. At this stage, it's impossible to know how CBDA and CBGA will fare, but the odds aren't fantastic.

Other drugs that showed similar early promise for treating COVID have since failed spectacularly, harming users and sowing political discord in the process. Ivermectin, azithromycin, and hydroxychloroquine all fought coronavirus infection in cells, but we now know that they do nothing to prevent or treat COVID in humans.

But at least cannabinoids are largely safe; humans have been guinea pigs in their Phase 1 trial for millennia.
Another important caveat: even the researcher's study was only proposing cannabinoids "as a complement to vaccines."
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Despite Cannabinoids Study, 'Odds Aren't Fantastic' It Will Ever Treat Covid More

Despite Cannabinoids Study, 'Odds Aren't Fantastic' It Will Ever Treat Covid

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  • runners high (Score:3)

    by transporter_ii ( 986545 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @11:50AM (#62174909) Homepage

    Of course, you can create your own cannabinoids:

    https://www.salon.com/2022/01/... [salon.com]

    And they may actually help against COVID...maybe, but maybe not for the cannabinoids:

    More exercise means less risk of developing severe Covid, according to a compelling new study of physical activity and coronavirus hospitalizations. The study, which involved almost 50,000 Californians who developed Covid, found that those who had been the most active before falling ill were the least likely to be hospitalized or die as a result of their illness.

    Source = New York Times.

  • This is Slate.

  • TFA is misleading (Score:3)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @12:04PM (#62174939)

    The FDA disagrees with TFAs conclusions on Ivermectin.

    "There is insufficient evidence for the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel (the Panel) to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin"

    https://www.covid19treatmentgu... [nih.gov]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fazig ( 2909523 )
      Bad phrasing for people who don't understand the concept of Burden of Proof, which is a lot of people who read that stuff.
      A scientific institution ought to know better.

  • How ever will we deliver cannabinoids to the lungs and upper respiratory tract? If only there was some means of administration that resulted in distribution throughout the respiratory system.

    Joking aside, any time something works in a petri dish, I think of XKCD...

    https://xkcd.com/1217/ [xkcd.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dpilot ( 134227 )

      I thought I read somewhere that the particular chemicals in the cannabinoids that are effective against Covid are de-activated by heat. So no, you can't smoke it and you can't bake it, either.

  • That was some early advice - the Covid virus is killed by high temperatures, so drink lots of hot coffee to raise your body temperature.

    Only problem: The virus dies at 62 Celsius. Humans die at 42 Celsius. Lots of things kill Covid. You need to find something that kills Covid and lets the humans survive; that's the hard bit.

  • We have a catch and release program going on in Seattle right now.

  • Cannabis is on Schedule-1 - inappropriately I believe, but it's still there, and that means that it's very difficult to do research with.

    • Also, we use hand sanitizer because alcohol kills COVID-19 on our hands. Sunlight kills covid (and HIV) too, on a surface such as a petri dish.

      Killing a virus on a petri dish or other surface is easy. Killing it after it's *inside your cells* is far, far more difficult.

      This is the mistake Donald Trump made when we he said "scientists should research" if simple methods like light and alcohol can be applied within the body. Once it's in your body, inside the cells you need to live, it's an entirely different

      • Just to clarify, the study did not show that CBDA, CBGA or THCA-A kills COVID. They found that the presence of these compounds prevented the virus from entering human cells, possibly by binding to the spike protein which is COVID's attack vector for entering cells. Still, it's one thing to see the effect in a petri dish, and entirely another to trigger the same effect in a person, so I think they need to devise more studies, at the very least.
      • We already know we can take cannabinoids without them killing us though.

        • We can also take sunlight and alcohol without them killing us. Soap too, as anyone who had their mouth washed out with soap knows.

          The thing is, if X doesn't kill us (by killing our cells), X generally won't kill the virus RNA inside our cells.

      • To support your point, drenching the petri dish with bleach will also kill the virus (most other poisons will work, too). It is still not recommended to drink bleach, because that will kill you as well (most other poisons can do that, too).

        The difficult part is killing the virus without killing the host.

    • Too much money is at stake for removing it from schedule 1. You have the DEA and everyone it employs, plus the private prisons (who sign contracts to operate at a fixed capacity) and down to the local cops who can rummage through your vehicle because they smelled weed. Politicians are slowly coming around though as they're whores at heart and can't resist that sweet tax revenue it generates.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pz ( 113803 )

      The two compounds that were tested here are not controlled substances (and presumably are not psychoactive).

      See the Oregon State press release at https://today.oregonstate.edu/... [oregonstate.edu]:

      “These cannabinoid acids are abundant in hemp and in many hemp extracts,” van Breemen said. “They are not controlled substances like THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and have a good safety profile in humans. And our research showed the hemp compounds were equally effective against variants of SARS-CoV-2, including variant B.1.1.7, which was first detected in the United Kingdom, and variant B.1.351, first detected in South Africa.”

      Also, this is not the first time that effects from cannabinoids have been found against SARS-CoV-2, as other researchers have seen similar results in 2021 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987002/).

  • 1 Study = Rigorous Anecdote (Score:3)

    by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Saturday January 15, 2022 @01:43PM (#62175189)

    Please everyone remember that even if this one study showed effectiveness in live human patients rather than in petri dishes, it'd probably still wrong. Just like the early studies that showed promise in Ivermectin, etc.

    One published study is where scientific peer review begins. It's an invitation to the wider scientific community to prove you wrong - and statistically speaking, there's an incredibly good chance they will. *Especially* in medicine, which suffers from much lower repeatability than almost any other field. Presumably because of some combination of the fact that the human body is confoundingly complex, most doctors (even in research) have training that's heavy on being a "body mechanic", and light on a firm understanding of statistics and proper research methodology, and the fact that there's lots of money to be made from a "success" that doesn't actually work, but can get approved for usage anyway.

  • If weed prevented COVID, don't you think we'd have noticed by now?

  • I treat Covid every day with it, since 1973.

  • People stupid enough to buy CBD will LOVE this

  • Given the basis of decriminalization, this will likely become an approved and promoted treatment while other, less politically correct treatments will remain forbidden by the cultural elites.

  • Then it should be relatively straightforward to take a vertical slice of population using cannabis in smoking, in edible, and not using, then study the effect of covid on those slice : which percentage got Covid, which percentage of those who got it got to hospital, was forcefully vented, died, etc.... By now millions of people had it in the US, and that include places where cannabis is available either through dispensary, or for recreational activities.
  • I really hate how it has become a cure all super herb. There are significant clinical benefits for both mind and body, not to mention its pretty good source of nutrition. It is not however a panacea for all our woes.

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